Question: Advocacy
You can’t deny the fact that social media has changed a lot of things in our everyday lives, even if you personally don’t use it all that much. Social media has changed the way we communicate with each other, what we deem as appropriate to share with our loved ones – and total strangers. It is merely a matter of perspective how you see the change in relation to what used to be, to pre-social media times: is it a good or a bad thing to you can vary a lot based on your personal life experiences, such as the generation you were born into. Gen Z’ers tend to see social media in a more positive light than baby boomers, and the reasons for that are pretty self-explanatory.
Your Skin, Our Guidelines
It didn’t take long for me to start having problems with the social media platforms I was posting my art on. During the first few months of working on the project, I was struggling immensely with posting and KEEPING my illustrations up on Instagram, because of one specific thing.
Community Guidelines.
WARNING!
Have you ever heard of freak shows? Those exhibitions or circus fairs where people with physical deformities and disabilities were put up on display for “normal” folk to look at and be disgusted, fascinated, repulsed by. Thankfully freak shows have been left in the past, at least for the most part. But even after their prime time, we have continued on to treat disabled and chronically ill people with the same kind of disrespect as that of freak shows. And while the exhibitionists during the 1800’s were often paid for their labor as a “freak of nature”, now in the 21st century, we don’t get those kinds of privileges. So, to some extend, things have gotten worse instead of progressing. But isn’t that the nature of things nowadays in general?
Second Nature
There's a great deal of frustration I've had to deal with during the past couple of months. In a lot of ways, my situation is very stagnant: nothing is happening, no matter how hard I try, how hard I work, everything's just standing still. Especially regarding my health – I can't get proper treatment before I've moved out of my current city, and that has proved to become such an enormous issue that I am considering contacting an actual lawyer. Currently, the only treatment that I have is medicating; I have several antidepressants, one antipsychotic, and one beta blocker. But no planned therapy or consultation. And that is why I've been getting worse and worse by the day, slowly drifting toward that deep slump of depression I was in last summer. And all of this just because of one shitty city and their terrible mental health care that puts the blame for their mental suffering on the suicidal person themself.
My Soul Is An Infinite Pit Of Emptiness
Last summer, I spent over a month on the psychiatric ward. I was acutely suicidal, I had planned everything for the moment I was going to kill myself. The month I spent in the hospital gave me a lot of answers to my situation, and the most important one of them all was a name for everything that was wrong with me.
For Your Pain, I Am Punishing Myself
I don't think I ever realized just how much I was hurting when it was happening to me. That might be due to dissociation or the very high likelihood that I am somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but as a kid I was very unaware of my own pain. Reading through diaries and journals I'd written back then is very difficult, because you can clearly see it in the text; how I was almost confused by the constant feeling of something being terribly wrong.
Where's My Body, And What Am I Doing To It?
Whenever I tell someone that I suffer from dissociation due to my childhood trauma, they usually ask me if it really is some kind of an out-of-body experience, like you're looking at yourself from the outside. And usually, I tend to reply to this question with 'no'.
And My Scars Are The Only Thing You Will Ever See
I've already written about that one very frustrating appointment I had with my psychologist a bit before Christmas. There were a lot of things that bothered me in that conversation, but one of them was noticeably bigger than the rest. I could not stop thinking about the way my psychologist approached the entire issue: making me feel responsible for my own reckless behavior and thus harming the people around me more than myself. I think at the very core of this discussion was the idea that I was doing this to myself because I was making that conscious decision to harm myself instead of doing something productive. That it was my responsibility, my fault even if you will, that I was cutting my arms into shreds.
I Need My Deep, Salty Wounds
Wanting to be in pain is against human nature, and so is wanting to die. As a living organism, you are programmed to always strive to survive, keep living as long as possible because life is precious and should be protected. It is not rational to want to end your own life, because that would mean that you'd seize to exist, which is what all living things want to avoid.